Breaking Barriers
by Rainne
Summary: A Little Mermaid vignette set as she comes to the surface for the first time. Came from staring at a water bottle for too long. Review if the mood strikes you.


A/N: This is just a quick thing, because I have to write or I'll die but the well's running kind of dry as far as my other stories are going. So anyway, I got to thinking while looking at a water bottle in Latin class about the way the surface of the water looks from underneath, and that got me thinking about the Little Mermaid. Here's the result.

High above her watery home, the little mermaid, youngest daughter of the great Mer-king, craned her neck to gaze at the wavering barrier between her world and the world of men. She was barely a yard away from her goal, her dream- to at last see the surface. It was the only thing she'd ever truly wanted in her young life, and now it would happen. That thought alone curved her lips into a smile. But the smile was tinged with a slight anxiety. The mermaid remembered the stories her sisters had told.  
  
She slowly drifted sideways, so that she faced the barrier as she would the mirror in her room. Her sisters had told her she couldn't do that on the surface. They had told her men could not simply swim to the ceiling of their world. This puzzled the little mermaid. The idea of being limited to merely traveling along the ground, like the meekest of starfish, the most underdeveloped of anemones, seemed utterly laughable. How do men travel, if they must contend with every rock, gorge, or frightening eel they come across?  
  
Ridding her mind of her sisters' worrisome tales, the little mermaid reached out a hand to the barrier's shuddering plane. Just as she was about to break it, it rocked away from her, or up depending on your spatial orientation. She laughed slightly; it was as if the barrier was playing with her, breaking the nervous ice that had spread over her resolve. She reached again, and this time the barrier rushed towards her. All at once her hand was thrust through to the other side. The little mermaid jerked her appendage back almost instantly, upon her very first feel of cool sea air. She gently rubbed her tingling fingers with her other hand, alarmed by this first startling experience.  
  
She took a breath and firmly told herself, "This is silly. You're being silly. All this time, asking and asking to go to the surface and you finally do, and what happens? You get scared off by the lightest touch of- whatever that was." Her sisters had told her plenty of the surface's strange people and their manners, but little had been said in warning of meteorological phenomena such as wind. Apparently it didn't figure highly in the sisters' personal recollections. No matter, though, after shaking off her initial surprise, the little mermaid was ready for another- more controlled, she told herself- attempt.  
  
But she paused long enough to turn over and face her home, the glittering sea-city she loved so dearly. On the verge of at last fulfilling her dream and proudly diving into the world of men head first, the city had never looked more beautiful. Again she felt a stab of pity for the poor ground-locked man. He could never view his home from above as she could. He could never trace every gleaming street with his eyes, all leading to her resplendent home: the Mer-king's palace. With one last fond smile, the little mermaid turned back to the barrier and drifted back into a vertical position. Holding her smile to greet this new world with, she gently rose with a few moderate waves of her tail. The surface broke over her head, and slid past her forehead, her eyes, her cheekbones. At her upper chest she halted progress to have a look around. The breeze skimmed over her arms like a chilled jet stream, and lifted the tiny hairs that broke free of the sodden mass that felt very heavy on her head all of a sudden. The bit that remained underwater still continued to drift around her as usual, but the rest lay heftily on her back. The mermaid twisted her neck back and forth, trying to ease the burden of it without dislodging the pearls and sea flowers her sisters had threaded in before she had left. They can't be too attractive-looking now, thought the mermaid bitterly, limp and matted into this bed of seaweed attached to my head.  
  
The mermaid tilted her head back to get more of her hair back into the water, but her discomfort was forgotten upon the sight of the sky. It paled to almost a white yellow at the edges, but directly ahead was a rich and smooth blue the likes of which she'd never seen. The color was only impeded by strange white formations, almost like rock deposits, but they seemed to float in the sky like sea foam. How could this be? she wondered. She whipped around in an attempt to see every corner of the sky at once. She was again shocked to a stop when she saw the dark formations. Now THEY looked like rocks, they were the same gray black color. But not quite the same. No, there was something about this gray black, something that troubled but intrigued the mermaid. She swam towards them, using her arms to keep her face above as her tail worked below. Unconsciously straightening the flower in her hair, the little mermaid spoke softly in her musical voice, "I wonder what I could find there..."A/N: My, that went on for a bit longer than I thought it would! So what do you think? A thought-provoking read? Boring as all get out? Review, if the mood strikes you. 


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